Development of a multi-criteria decision support tool for sustainable building retrofits

Abstract

The existing building stock represents a major challenge for a successful energy transition and achieving zero carbon territories. Several thermal simulation tools have integrated optimization modules for building design and retrofit. However, in these tools there are problems of convergence towards local optimum and the unknown computation time. Indeed, we propose in this research work a tool allowing an optimal choice of building envelope to achieve a sustainable building retrofit by integrating 16 criteria representing the heating energy needs as well as economic and environmental criteria. This tool is based on thermo-aeraulic dynamic simulation using TRNSYS and CONTAM software, the metamodeling based on the design of experiments method and polynomial regression as well as three multicriteria analysis methods such as weighted sums, Min Max and Pareto optimality. Using this tool, the calculation time of the optimization process and the uncertainties of the results are known. Thermal comfort considered as a social criterion is studied in the post-processing. A real-life existing building located in La Rochelle city (France) was chosen as a case study. The results show that the tool developed allows a rapid choice of building envelope technical solutions and to get a compromise between all criteria studied.